Posted on 05/29/2015 2:43:38 PM PDT by lbryce
A perfect example of the idocracy I was talking about.
I’ll take “Idiocracy” to mean, “doesn’t buy into the God complex”.
Common sense is a gift that can be used or ignored.
How about accepting fate and not expecting Doctors to be "Gods".
Glad to hear you’re not going to skip that scope. I know 0KenyanCare makes it tough. Barrett’s is not to be ignored!
(Just don’t go to the clinic that Joan Rivers went to....is it even still in business??)
Prolly already here, FRiend :(
It’s likely built in to 0KenyanCare....buried deep, being ushered in on one of the Medicare reg pages. #DeathPanels
Diagnosing stomach cancer in an 18-year old WOULD be ridiculous.
It is not negligent to fail to consider stomach cancer in a teenager.
Diagnosing a BAD problem in a NEW automobile WOULD be ridiculous... but it happens.
My point: GOOD doctors, like GOOD mechanics DO NOT overlook the improbable.
The symptoms and physical complaints persisted and were in line with a potential diagnosis of stomach cancer. That possibility should have been considered, investigated and ruled out even if it was not statistically likely. Would a correct diagnosis have saved her? We'll never know.
>>How about accepting fate and not expecting Doctors to be “Gods”.
Precisely my point. Accepting fate should mean that medical incompetence should have consequences, not necessarily for the HCPs, but for the system itself. In the US, malpractice litigation is an industry, and this drives up costs for medical care. Not so in countries like the UK, where “bed blocking” is discussed openly by NHS officials.
In single-slayer countries like the UK, there is no recourse for iatrogenic injury. Note how careful the girl’s mother is to not appear to fault the system.
How was the initial diagnosis incompetent since the symptoms were exactly described
as anorexia? She was a Model, it fit both the symptom and the personality of the patient
which is very common in that line of work.
We have the luxury of hindsight and I'm not arguing the hindsight aspect, I'm arguing
the point before knowing she had cancer. Put away the fact she died of Cancer and
look at the initial diagnosis to gain the proper perspective.
Again, 30k for a biopsy on every anorexic dingbat supermodel wanabe is ridiculous.
And if that happened many would be here Bitching about the waste of money causing their
medical care to become more expensive! Two sides to the coin, so there's my hindsight.
Keep on arguing the liberal view.
You’re assuming I disagree with your view on over excessive testing. You are missing my point in this instance.
Show me where in the article it says the girl was anorexic. It doesn’t. It says the doctors assumed she was.
Suppose you have breathing problems which ordinarily you would expect a doctor to investigate. But suppose on the way to your exam you are in the presence of a smoker and your clothes smelled like smoke when you are in seeing him.
(I have a relative that every time I go to his house for more than 10 minutes I come out with my clothes strongly smelling of cigarette smoke).
So the doctor assumes you smoke, thus your breathing problem is no big deal, thus your lung cancer goes undetected until it metastasizes.
Another example:
15 years ago I went into A Fib (I didn’t know what I was experiencing). When I went to the cardiologist the first thing he asked was how much did I drink. According to him, 50% of the people who came in in A Fib had been on drinking binges. I said two or so beers every day. He took me at my word and I received treatment. He did not assume I lied and send me home with an admonition to stop going on drinking binges.
Doctors are often the furthest thing from being prescient.
I knew a young couple who were living in central Arizona when the girl came down with very weird symptoms. They saw 4 or 5 doctors who didn’t have a clue, and one of them said, “This can happen to young women”. Finally an Internet search found a 100% match of her symptoms to Dengue fever. With this information they went to a new doctor who actually did a test for Dengue. It was, and he was surprised because there wasn’t and hadn’t been a case of Dengue fever in central AZ in living memory.
However, doctors in southern AZ had been given an alert to look out for symptoms of Dengue fever. But not in central AZ.
The last clue was that there apartment was near some north-south railroad tracks. The mosquito likely hitched a ride.
A similar dilemma happened to an older man who had briefly visited Mexico and got himself a case of amoebic dysentery. He saw I think four doctors, with one thinking cancer, and another “that just happens when you get old.” He had dysentery for an entire month of misery, and it really hurt him, until one doctor asked if he had gone to Mexico recently. Yep. A quick test and one pill later and he was better.
Doctors are neither mind readers nor magical.
She was not anorexic.
That was just the label they hung on her because they apparently couldn't think of any other reason a teenager would lose weight.
This is socialist elitism at it’s natural outcome. Mommy/daddy dearest government doctor will take care of the village’s children. Don’t worry.
Some doctors actually listen to what their patients are saying and look for answers.
I have been treated by the first, now have the second and the improvement in my health is amazing.
I have Medicaid so I don’t have much choice in what doctors or medical systems I can visit.
In October 2013 I had a trans-vaginal ultra sound done. All my primary doctor told me is I had some “enlargement” and she wanted to get my anemia under control. So she prescribed iron pills and said I shouldn’t have as much problem with them as others I had taken. Well that was wrong and I had to stop after one month - which I told her but she ignored.
In October 2014 my iron level was 13 and my hemoglobin 9.4. So I got sent to get iron infusions for 7 weeks. My iron did go up to 79 by Jan 2015 but in March is was back to 47. My hemoglobin also had a slight rise and then fell again.
When I went to the appointment in Jan 2015 I decided I needed to go ahead and get it looked into by a gyno. So I went up to the office to see if they had any openings for medicaid. I had to cancel that first appointment in Feb and made one for Friday March 13th. She sent me for an ultrasound that I had done at the end of March. In April I had to go for an endo biopsy and she did a pap also. Damn they both hurt like hell.
I had an appointment on Monday with another doctor and had gotten the robo call on Saturday to confirm but on Sunday after noon I got a real person confirming. I knew then something was wrong. So when I got there on Monday I was told I needed to go upstairs. I was told I had complex hyperplasia with atypia. Which is not good and told if I didn’t already have cancer I probably would.
So she sent me to a doctor that specialized in cancer to do the surgery. That was the end of April and had my surgery on May 8th. My final diagnosis was Stage 1A grade 1 endometrial cancer. Had a total hysterectomy, 40 lymph nodes taken, gall bladder and stones, and a layer of fat called the omentum where cancer cells like to hide out. Surgical menopause is a horrible thing. Lucked out and have to go get checked every 6 months for the next 5 years. Still worried about colon, liver and skin cancer because of family history and since I did have this cancer that also slightly increases chance of some others.
Just makes me wonder what might have been different if my primary doctor had looked further into that “enlargement” and not just brushed it off. Of course she has also told me I just like to get diagnosed and that she was going to farm me out to other doctors because I seemed to listen to them more that I did her. Actually it is more a case of they listen to ME. I don’t think I will go back to her other than try to get all of my records.
I knew something was wrong but my primary doctor didn’t really listen to me. I am just glad I decided that day to go upstairs.
—
One of my favorite tv show episodes that I watched as a kid that really made an impact on me was a Designing Women where Charlene had a lump in her breast and her doctor told her to let him worry about it. Julia confronted him and told him he could do the worrying but he didn’t have to do the dying.
Anorexic females force themselves to vomit, with stomach cancer they would not. I say malpractice.
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